Computer network-based communications systems, such as real-time collaboration systems or instant messaging systems, are increasingly used within and between businesses and other organizations to enhance communications and cooperation between parties. Typically, before two parties can communicate with each other, each party must provide his or her collaboration system with an identifier that the collaboration system uses to identify the other party. Common examples of such identifiers include email addresses and collaboration system-specific user IDs, which are typically maintained in contact lists. Collaboration systems typically provide their users with the current status of each of the contacts in their contact lists, such as indicating whether or not a contact is currently logged-in to his/her collaboration system and available to receive communications. The status of a user of a collaboration system is typically set by the user or by the collaboration system itself. Some collaboration systems provide gateways that allow their users to communicate with and receive the status of their contacts who belong to other collaboration systems. However, as different types of collaboration systems may use different status descriptors, or may use the same status descriptor to mean different things, a user of one type of collaboration system might misinterpret the statuses of the user's contacts who belong to other collaboration systems.